AZ OOR

AZ OOR is a visual artist, storyteller and poet working at the intersection of fiction, history and speculative futures. A self-engaged Amazigh Futurist, AZ OOR engages the entangled relations between political imaginaries, land and Indigeneity from the Maghreb (North Africa as a site of participation in the World). Through oral storytelling, archival material and scenographic interventions they investigate the tension between prophecy and history, examining how (re)imagined and oneiric realms can disrupt political orders. A central concern in AZ OOR’s work is to examine the ideologies of Progress and Development within the Developmentocene, a colonial epoch that accelerates sentient life and transforms it into raw matter. Their artistic vocabulary alternates between quasi-theatrical forms, fragmented texts and scenographic vocality, articulating an Amazigh future that has not yet happened and a nostalgia for something that did not exist. This exploration inhabits a “Barzakh,” an in-between space that frustrates conventional categories of being and non-being, inside and outside. AZ OOR’s Amazigh Futurism rejects the linear logic of conventional Futurism, proposing an alternative rooted in the excavation of ancestrality. This approach not only proposes alternate realities, but seeks to “ghost” futuristic plateaus by provoking black holes of antimatter, a gesture toward opacity and the refusal of totalizing narratives. AZ OOR has exhibited, performed, and lectured internationally at venues such as Drawing Room UK, MMVI of Modern & Contemporary Art, Le18, Crac Occitanie, and Kunsthalle Mulhouse, Chapter Arts Center. They have also participated in international artist-in-residency programs including the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Moussem Nomadic Arts Center, Matadero Madrid, and Mothership in Tangier, Etc